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Merrill Shatzman

Professor of the Practice Emeritus of Art, Art History and Visual Studies

Education

M.F.A., University of Wisconsin at Madison 1981

Overview

Merrill Shatzman received her B.F.A. degree from the Rhode Island School of Design and M.A. and M.F.A. degrees from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her work as an abstract printmaker includes images in relief, silkscreen, lithography, bookmaking and digital media. Over the past fifteen years her prints have been exhibited in ninety solo, invitational, group and juried shows throughout the United States and internationally, including a solo exhibitions at the Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University (April 2009), Roanoke College (2008). Shatzman's award winning prints are found in numerous museum and corporate collections in the United States including: the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Boston Public Library, The Fogg Museum, UCLA's Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, the Huntsville Museum of Art, the Mint Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Art, California State University Long Beach, Museum of Art, Texas Tech University, National Museum of American Art, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. Her abundantly detailed woodcuts explore the "universal language" created by signs, writing systems, symbols and pre-imagined images (such as maps, charts, photographs, texts and written language). Inspired by her passion for written forms from multiple cultures, including Middle Eastern, Far Eastern and Mesoamerican, her black-and-white relief images are rich with calligraphic marks, camouflage, patterning and symbols, which allude to signs and letters, condensed and illegible. Her symbolic interpretations of the visual letterforms respond to the rich cultural history of the civilizations from which they are inspired, contemplating ideas of relics and interweaving the domains of philosophy, religion, mysticism, linguistics and humanistic inquiry. Her most recent prints combine digital imaging and silkscreen printing, uniquely highlighting the similarities between these different media through her abstract, highly patterned written forms.

Pages

The Letters Project is a multi-media collaborative project by Merrill Shatzman (graphic artist), Raquel Salvatella de Prada (animator) and Deborah Pope (poet). Supported by a Duke University Council for the Arts Collaborative Development Grant in 2008.

Pages

The Letters Project is a multi-media collaborative project by Merrill Shatzman (graphic artist), Raquel Salvatella de Prada (animator) and Deborah Pope (poet). Supported by a Duke University Council for the Arts Collaborative Development Grant in 2008.

The Letters Project is a multi-media collaborative project by Merrill Shatzman (graphic artist), Raquel Salvatella de Prada (animator) and Deborah Pope (poet). Supported by a Duke University Council for the Arts Collaborative Development Grant in 2008.

The Letters Project is a multi-media collaborative project by Merrill Shatzman (graphic artist), Raquel Salvatella de Prada (animator) and Deborah Pope (poet). Supported by a Duke University Council for the Arts Collaborative Development Grant in 2008.

Seven prints of my prints were included in the Biennale Internationale d’estampe Contemporaine de Trois-Rivieres. This exhibition, the largest in Canada, is dedicated to printmaking and will be located in four venues in Quebec (Ancienne gare ferroviare, Centre d’exposition Raymond-Lasnier, Galerie d’art du Parc and Musee Pierre-Boucher). Prints included in the show are grouped by theme in each exhibition space. My work was included with works classified under Motifs and Cultures, described in the catalogue as,
“Whether they be simple or complex, motifs reflect the traditions and culture of a people at different epochs. Drawing from varied sources of inspiration, at once vegetal, geometrical and symbolical, artists attempt to conceptualize these forms in order to imbue them with renewed meaning s more in tune with the contemporary world. The dissected, interrelated and re-positioned image is in constant evolution, and the artist created is own contemporary cartography.”

Shatzman was one of 56 artists from 25 countries, 9 of whom were American, included in this prestigious international exhibition.

Miswired: MCI a silkscreen print was included in The International Print Triennial in Krakow (Miedzynarodowe Triennale Grafiki in Polish, abbreviation MTG). The exhibition located in the Contemporary Art Gallery Bunkier Sztuki in Krakow, includes works by 104 artists from throughout the world. This print exhibition, one of most important events for the world’s graphic arts, offers a special opportunity for the viewers to explore recent trends in printmaking and to get insight into its cultural and artistic diversity. It provides proof of the remarkable variety of creative impulses sparked by printmaking, a medium undergoing constant changes and, at the same time, preserving its separate position in terms of the medium, the idea, and the technique. Seeking to open up to the changes within contemporary art, organizers of the MTG – Krakow 2015 decided to eliminate limitations in respect to the size of submitted works, as well as accept works that combine printmaking techniques with other means of artistic expression and other creative tools. I was one of nine Americans included in the exhibition.

Twenty silkscreen prints from my Alphabetic Excursions series were on display in the Corridor Gallery for three months during the Spring 2013 semester. This series of work included fifty plus images used silkscreen and woodcuts based on a similar matrix,

Seven digital and silkscreen images were included in this exhibition that highlighted Duke University faculty work. I chose to include works that displayed the relationship between my digitally driven drawings and digital silkscreen work.

Like those found in their inspirational sources of Mughal and Persian Miniature paintings and manuscripts, Alphabetic Excursions Illuminated Manuscripts combine woodcut and silkscreen images to emphasize calligraphic styles with richly patterned backgroun

Word Map Grids are a series of six woodcut and chine colle images that dissect and reassemble drawings from my earlier prints, creating map-like images with glyphs and graphic marks found throughout the images. These icons are further emphasized in the c